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Thomas Byrne
Associate Professor
Biography
Thomas Byrne is an Associate Professor at the Boston College School of Social Work, having joined the faculty in 2025. He believes that access to safe, stable and decent housing is a fundamental prerequisite for a fulfilling and dignified life. This conviction motivates his scholarship, which focuses broadly on the causes, consequences, and policy solutions to housing insecurity and homelessness. Dr. Byrne’s work primarily employs quantitative and quasi-experimental methods to explore policy-relevant questions, including how housing market dynamics and interventions shape community-level homelessness rates; the effectiveness of prevention-focused approaches; and the interrelationships between housing insecurity, housing assistance, and health. Through his affiliation with the Department of Veterans Affairs, Dr. Byrne has collaborated on numerous studies on efforts to prevent and end homelessness among military veterans. Dr. Byrne’s work has been supported by numerous public and private sources, including the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, the W.T. Grant Foundation, the Blue Cross/Blue Shield of Massachusetts Foundation, the Health Resources and Services Administration, and the Department of Veterans Affairs. His research has been published in high-impact journals that span a number of fields, including The American Journal of Public Health, Health Affairs , Housing Policy Debate , Journal of General Internal Medicine , Social Service Review, and the Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science . His work has also been featured in local and national media outlets, including The Boston Globe , Time, NPR, and The New York Times . Dr. Byrne currently serves on the editorial board for the journal Health Services Research , and is a member of the National Alliance to End Homelessness’ Research Advisory Council. At the local level, he is currently a member of the Board of Directors of Hearth, Inc., an organization dedicated to ending elder homelessness. He has also served on a number of committees that shape policy-responses to homelessness, including previous membership on the City of Boston’s Mayoral Advisory Council to End Homelessness. In the classroom, Dr. Byrne aims to equip the next generation of social work practitioners with the policy analysis skills needed to drive real-world change, while also supporting doctoral students and post-doctoral fellows in their development as independent scholars.